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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

{inspired by} three nails photography

One of my Facebook friends was spotted "liking" Three Nails Photography. This must have been mid-2010 because starting my own business wasn't even on my radar.

All I knew is that I LOVED photography, and with all the free time I had on my hands during my day job, I had time to check out just about anything.

Three Nails Photography.

My first question was: what is this?

I mean, I knew it was fabulous. The colours. The feathers. The smiling-with-you-eyes. The whismy-ness (I'm sure there's a word for that but it's not coming to the front of the filing cabinet in my brain at the moment). But I had no idea whether the couples were real, whether people actually got married at a chicken farm...

I looked at every single post, and I haven't stopped checking this blog ever since.

Although TNP's editing style is very much unique to them and them alone, I decided to try it out on a lazy Wednesday afternoon. I mean, why not take a few minutes and play around with colours and split toning and gradient filters? Isn't this the very reason I left my day job...? To pursue creativity to the n'th degree on a lazy Wednesday afternoon?

And here's my take on their whimsical, beautiful, fairy-tale editing style:

Here's a shot of the before & after, with a couple details on achieving this look using Lightroom, and Lightroom only!

First thing's first...I needed to turn this cold November landscape into something cozy, warm, and inviting. I upped the temperate dramatically to get this look.

Next up, I decreased the contrast almost entirely, to get rid of any harsh edges or dramatic effects of light and dark. I also upped the brightness slightly, and decreased the saturation by a smidge.

Now here's the fun part...the COLOURS! I played around with the hues and saturation until I was happy with the result. I altered the hues of the grass and boosted the saturation of Jeff's blue jeans and shirt collar, to make sure that those colours didn't get lost in the shuffle.

And, of course, split toning. I've touched on this effect once before and it really is my go-to in terms of giving a photo a whimsy feel (still searching my brain for that word). In this case, the saturation of the shadows and highlights is a lot higher than I'd regularly use, but that's what makes Three Nails Photography stand out in the crowd.

I also used a variety of gradients, to light up the top right corner, darken the bottom right corner, and give a few more hints of colour to the final edit. By NO means was this intended to be a description of how I think Three Nails edits their amazing photos, I simply played around and ended up with something I liked, thanks to a little bit of inspiration :)